Riding the Color Line: A Century of Race and Cycling

Major Taylor in France in 1908 (image wikipedia via Bibliotheque Nationale de France).

Last week The Grio examined the impact of the color line on contemporary cycling, a discussion that reaches back to cycling’s primal 19th-century moments. On the one hand, there is an enormous amount of evidence confirming that American cyclists have always included people of color, and a 2013 study on cycling and diversity confirms that cycling’s demographics reach well beyond the caricature of lycra-clad White bourgeois. The Grio’s article covered familiar ground, and it could well describe nearly any collective of riders attracted to cycling for its health effects, competition, and sociality.

On the other hand, though, myriad cycling clubs, national advocacy groups, and the elite levels of American cycling underscore the way the color line persistently shapes the mundane realities of bike riding. The discussion of race and cycling reveals deep-seated anxieties about diversity in cycling circles, and it reaches from the elite levels of the sport to grassroots recreational riders. The discourse on color and cycling is not at all unique; instead, it is symptomatic of everyday racial divides reaching from sport to houses of worship that Americans have historically ignored or avoided.

The Boston Daily Globe included this image of Taylor in its pages in 1897 (image wikipedia).

Watts had lobbied to restrict Black membership at the 1892 convention, and in 1893 he again led a collective of delegates attempting to restrict League membership to Whites only. Commenting on Watts’ narrow 1893 defeat, Cycling World argued that “Watts and his brand of swashbucklers should be disarmed of the weapons with which they menace the general peace. They should be muzzled.” The League’s The Bicycling World and L.A.W. Bulletin indignantly responded that “Mr. Watts and the rest of the men who supported his amendment at the National Assembly by their dignified and manly attitude under defeat won the respect and admiration of every gentleman in that convention.”

When Watts again raised the issue in Louisville in 1894, the League’s Kentucky contingent was among a handful of state groups that had already made its own membership White exclusive. Watts argued that at least 5000 new Southern members would join when the color line was drawn, and the proposal passed with little discussion on a vote of 127 to 54. Andrew Ritchie’s “The League of American Wheelmen, Major Taylor and the “Color Question” in the United States in the 1890s” captures the commonplace mechanics of racism that are reflected in the League’s vote: “the deeply prejudiced activities of one racist spokesman, supported by others in a secret vote, and working within a formally democratic process, succeeded in enabling the racist feelings of more than 70 percent of the League delegates to be expressed, and in defining the League as a racist organization.”

The actual effect of racial exclusion codes more than a century ago is complicated. William Walker Watts’ optimism that thousands of Southerners would flock to the League of American Wheelmen when it became segregated did not come true. By February 1895 the New York Times reported that the League membership had fallen by nearly 10,000 members, and the Massachusetts delegation moved unsuccessfully to reverse the racist exclusion. There is little evidence that the racist codes were ever especially vigorously patrolled. Nevertheless, it is difficult to appreciate the chilling effect organizations’ exclusions had on subsequent cycling groups.

In August, 1901 Washington D.C.’s The Colored American included this ad for a Taylor race (image from Chronicling America)

The highest levels of elite cycling still include few people of color. To attribute this simply to the cost of cycling is at best only a dimension of the challenge. Equipment cost is a genuine barrier to elite cycling, but football equipment is not inexpensive, and football leagues dot the nation and reach into many under-represented communities. In 1920, the Amateur Bicycle League (merged into USA Cycling in 1995) began to administer elite cycle racing in the US. USA Cycling is the national governing body for bike racing and runs developmental camps for future elite cyclists, but in 2010 they told The Grio that they do not even monitor minority cycling patterns; consequently, they do not appear to have a quantifiable or concrete social analysis of cycling and the color line. The blog Cycling in the South Bay unloaded on USA Cycling in April 2013, identifying its undistinguished record on diversity and poor record promoting Black cycling, proclaiming that “USA Cycling hates black people.” The pronouncement may seem rhetorical, but the sport’s elite levels remain segregated, and the sport and recreational cycling alike are weakened by the absence of a broader range of riders.

The American history of race and cycling is perhaps distinctive, but it is by no means unique. In 2009 The Guardian’s Matt Seaton wondered “Why is Cycling Such a `White’ Sport?” The paper impressionistically concluded that “cycling just doesn’t have the grassroots appeal to non-white communities.” However, Seaton acknowledged that, as in the US, “the cycling community may not always have had an unblemished record of anti-racism (this was certainly true of cycling clubs in the past – though no longer so).”

Major Taylor in a Belgian 1902 lithograph during his European racing (image from Cliff)

After being perhaps the most dominant cyclist on the face of the planet for the first decade of the 20th century, Major Taylor died penniless in Chicago in 1932, living his last years at the YMCA and the hospital’s charity ward before ending in an unmarked pauper’s grave. Taylor’s body was rescued from that anonymity in 1948, when Frank Schwinn had Taylor’s body moved and marked. Today Taylor’s name graces the Major Taylor velodrome in Indianapolis, as well as a street in Worcester, and Taylor became a member of the Bicycling Hall of Fame in 1989.

A bike might seem the most democratic of all machines, unable to be touched by color or class xenophobia. Yet it is impossible to understand a bike itself without understanding a complicated network of heritage and xenophobic (if unexamined) social presumptions.

As President of the MajorTaylor Bicycling Club of Minnesota I can say that we are proud to represent Major Taylor’s legacy in cycling and educating the cycling community in the Twin Cities. There are some very good African American cyclist, on the competitive level, in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Several of them are members of our club……

About me

I am a historical archaeologist who studies consumer culture, focusing on material consumption and the color line and the relationship between popular culture and contemporary materiality. I am a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); Docent in Historical Archaeology at the University of Oulu (Finland); Past-President of the Society for Historical Archaeology (2012-2013); and a cycling geek.